Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/182

168 Here I am on the Cliffs at half-past three or four o'clock. The snow more than a foot deep over all the land. Few, if any, leave the beaten paths. A few clouds are floating overhead, downy and dark. Clear sky and bright sun, yet no redness. Remarkable, yet admirable, moderation that this should be confined to the morning and evening. Greeks were they who did it. A mother-o'-pearl tint at the utmost they will give you at mid-day, and this but rarely. Singular enough! twenty minutes later, looking up, I saw a long, light-textured cloud, stretching from N. to S. with a dunnish mass and an enlightened border, with its under edge toward the west all beautiful mother-o'-pearl, as remarkable as a rainbow, stretching over half the heavens, and underneath it in the W. were flitting mother-o'-pearl clouds which change their loose-textured form, and melt rapidly away, never any so fast, even while I write. Before I can complete this sentence, I look up and they are gone, like smoke or rather the steam from the engine in the winter air. Even a considerable cloud, like a fabulous Atlantis or unfortunate Isle in the Hesperian sea, is dissolved and dispersed in a minute or two, and nothing is left but the pure ether. Then another comes by magic, is born out of the pure blue, empyrean with beautiful mother-o'-pearl tints, where not a shred of vapor